City of smoke — Where I now live,
it's just about impossible to smoke in public. Only a few refuges remain: certain
bars with seating outdoors, cigar clubs, the San Diego zoo. It's not like the
good old days. If you watch old black and white movies, you know that all of
America was a great place to smoke. I especially enjoy scenes that take place in
theatres full of men in fedoras smoking cigars.
France is still the land of gauloises and gitanes — the
land of smoke-filled rooms. The French love to smoke. Paris is hated and loved
for its smoky cafes. Most American expatriates in France complain about the smoke
for a year, then they get used to it and never give it another thought. As I
write, thousands of puritanical, non-smoking Americans happily sip their
espressos surrounded by smokers. In America, they would be outraged and would
insist that they could not tolerate the smoke. In France, they have no choice.
They adapt. They become polite and honest about smoking.
Many French people have a formal way of smoking through a long meal: one
before, one between courses, one with coffee (always served after dessert, never
with dessert), and one or more with cordials.
The French language has delightful expressions to describe smoking. For
example, to talk with a cigarette dangling from your lips is to "parler la
cloppé au bec," literally, to "speak butt-in-beak." One may substitute
just about any verb. You might bosser (to hump, as in to work) or
baiser (to hump, as in to screw) or, more likely, since the enactment of
the mandatory 35-hour workweek, glander (to do nothing, in a guilty,
lower-class, urban version of la dolce far niente) à la
cloppé au bec.
Could all of this smoky culture be blown away by legislative hot air?
In January of 1991, the French government passed a law requiring cafes,
restaurants, and bars to create and enforce non-smoking areas and to post
prominent signs indicating smoking and non-smoking areas.
I lived in Paris at the time. For weeks, television news broadcasts dedicated
several minutes a day to the topic. Journalists interviewed restaurateurs and men
in the street, smokers, and non-smokers. In the French bank where I worked, there
was a lot of talk about the new law. Would the police enforce it? Would the cafes
respect it? Was it a good idea?
At first, the law had little effect and barely was enforced. Nevertheless, the
authorities promised progressive enforcement.
Meanwhile, I moved back to California. Time passed. Last year I took a short
trip to Provence. I was curious to see how the anti-smoking campaign was
going.
Smoking in bars, restaurants, and cafes continued unchanged. Some places had
signs for non-smoking areas. The patrons always ignored the signs and second-hand
smoke often obscured them. One cafe had an illegally tiny sign, with tiny
letters, in a tiny corner of the room. It read, "Ceci est la zone
non-fumeur," or "Here's the non-smoking area." A couple of bars posted a sign
— apparently a mass-produced insult to the anti-smoking law — that said
simply, "Bar Fumeur," or "Smoking Bar." Finally, I saw the most sensible
of all signs, "Si la fumée vous déange, sortez." "If the smoke
bothers you, leave." — Michael Christian
| Stephen Cox is a
professor of literature at UC-San Diego. |
|
All cannon fodder is created equal —
I have been a libertarian for many years, and there are still some moments when I
remember why I am one.
I experienced one of those moments on New Year's Eve, when I watched Brit
Hume's show on the Fox News Network. Brit wasn't there that night, or things
might have turned out differently, but his panelists Morton Kondracke and Fred
Barnes were there as usual. Both are conservatives — or, in the case of
Kondracke, as close as you can come to it. Both welcomed the opportunity to
respond to the recent suggestion by Charles Rangel, Harlem's
congressman-for-life, that conscription be reinstituted in the United States. If
the Bushites want to fight a war, Rangel said, let those who support them face
the draft, or see their sons have to face it. Maybe then they'd think twice about
going to war.
The suggestion was ironic, but it reminded me of the days when liberals like
Rangel wanted "selective service" to become "universal military training," so
that the draft would somehow be rendered "fair." Teddy Kennedy was the apostle of
that religion. But Richard Nixon, a Republican president who, for once, was
following the lead of libertarian advisors, just went and abolished the whole
durn thing, and the draft was no longer available for social engineering.
It was Nixon's most truly conservative act. No conservative should be
attracted to conscription. Conscription was, and always will be, the favorite
agency of the aggressor state. In peacetime, it regiments and indoctrinates the
populace; in wartime, it encourages tactics of the most expensive kind, the kind
that (witness Vietnam) depend not on the advanced technology that always gives
the advantage to a capitalist, and therefore to a free, country, but on conscript
soldiers deployed as cannon fodder. Then, having sent "our boys" into battle, the
state can turn to the populace and pressure it for still more active support of
its policies, both foreign and domestic, so that the welfare of the citizen
soldiers will not be threatened.
Sixty years ago, Isabel Paterson, who was present at the start of the modern
conservative and libertarian movements, provided conclusive justification of the
principle of an all-volunteer army in her book "The God of the Machine;" twelve
years ago the principle was fully vindicated by the victory of the American
professional army in the Gulf War; one year ago the principle was revindicated by
the victory of the same army in Afghanistan, an army fighting with the express
purpose of minimizing cannon fodder. The principle was justified in every way
that a conservative should value. Knowing this, I confidently expected Kondracke
and Barnes to wail in opposition to the draft.
They didn't. Instead, both of them immediately and enthusiastically endorsed
it. Barnes was ridiculously explicit: we need the draft, he said, not
because we need more soldiers, but because we need more "fairness" and
"community" (such as we had during the Vietnam War!). As viewed by the two
conservative sages, conscription is social engineering's great success story,
providing invaluable lessons in democracy and togetherness. Just think: everybody
gets the same haircut! Besides, being drafted introduces you to people whom you
otherwise would never encounter (because, of course, you wouldn't want to
encounter them). In short, Kondracke and Barnes endorsed the most extreme and
vulgar nonsense of the modern liberals.
So it was then that I remembered why I'm a libertarian. It's because everybody
else is crazy.
No, really. They are. — Stephen Cox
| Ted Roberts is a
freelance humorist living in Huntsville, Ala. |
|
Winning isn't the only thing — Jesse
Jackson still is preaching racism, which as a sermon topic pays a lot better than
love, forgiveness, and all that old stuff about the other cheek. This time the
Pope of Prejudice, along with the Black Coaches Association, is blaming racist
America for the lack of black college football coaches. The BCA wants 20 percent
of the coaches' chairs to be filled with black hindquarters within three
years.
The BCA publicly has threatened to urge stellar black athletes to turn away
from schools that "lack diversity." That's hatespeak for "white coaches."
A waste of breath! Black athletes are too smart to reject Penn State, Alabama,
and USC for Southwest Central U, and thereby miss an opportunity for NFL riches.
Also, it's warming that white alumni don't reply in kind and deny their
contributions to big-time college football and basketball programs that lack
player diversity: not many whites on the field these days.
There's even more noise about coaches in the NFL. Sportswriters love to
display their racial loving kindness on this issue. (Wonder what percentage of
sportswriters are black?) It's all a conspiracy, they tell us. Why do they see
white racism concerning coaches and not black racism in the selection of players?
Why does one disproportion trouble them but not the other? How do you explain a
whopping 75 percent predominance of black players?
Easy. It is not a conspiracy. Blacks are better athletes. If you wanna win the
football game, odds are you'll select a black DB. Coaches, owners, and general
managers wanna win. There is no NFL executive so mean, so low down, so hateful of
minorities that he won't play Ricky Williams over his slower, smaller white
counterpart and clasp him with a tight interracial hug when he scores. The execs
want to win!
If the Grand Klagon of the KKK coached the New York Jets, you'd see the same
black player imbalance. So, why doesn't the same logic apply to the hiring of
coaches? — Ted Roberts
| Barry Loberfeld
is a freelance writer based in Long Island. |
|
The guns of Thomas Jefferson — Did
you celebrate January 1 as something besides New Year's Day? Among those who did
were Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the ACLU, the Baptist
Joint Committee on Public Affairs, and the Council for Secular Humanism.
The occasion? Why, it was the anniversary of President Thomas Jefferson's
letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. That document is famous for
Jefferson's construing of the First Amendment's religious clauses as "building a
wall of separation between Church and State." This broad and generous reading by
a Founding Father is seen as a support by those who advocate the notion that the
First Amendment goes far beyond its actual language.
One cannot help but wonder whether those who embrace the advocacy groups
mentioned above believe the Second Amendment may well have its own "Danbury
letter" in Jefferson's 1787 correspondence to William S. Smith. The Sage of
Monticello wrote: "And what country can preserve its liberties, if the rulers are
not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?
Let them take up arms. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time
with the blood of patriots and tyrants." There you have it. Every point of the
so-called "insurrectionist" theory of the Second Amendment is present and
accounted for: private citizens have a natural right to keep and bear arms as a
check on the rise of tyranny.
So why in the Danbury letter considered indispensable to our understanding of
the First Amendment, while the Smith letter is dismissed as irrelevant to our
understanding of the Second? Why don't our "civil libertarians" speak of the
Second Amendment's right to "take up arms"? Is or isn't Jefferson the Rosetta
stone of our inalienable rights and their codification in the Constitution? Or
has he become, much like that Constitution, suitable only when he serves our
ends? — Barry Loberfeld
| | |
